At Stanford's Social Neuroscience Laboratory, scientists have spent years studying kindness,

connection and empathy, but those can all seem in short supply at a time of deep divisions and uncertainty.

The head of that lab, Jamil Zaki, offers a different view, a data-driven reason to be

hopeful about each other and the future.

I spoke with Zaki recently about his latest book called Hope for Synix, the surprising science of human

goodness.

Demil Zaki, welcome to the News Hour.

Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. So you have been studying human goodness and kindness for 20 years which seems like a great job

But you wrote in this book that even over the last 10 or 15 years you yourself started to lose hope.

You said I could recite evidence about kindness from my lab and a dozen others, but as the

world seemed to grow greedier and more hostile, my instincts refused to follow the science.

This is probably something a lot of people can relate to.

So describe for us, what was it you were feeling?

Well, it is a cool job, first of all to study human goodness and I think because of that I've become

a little bit of an unofficial ambassador for humanity's better angels.

People ask me to speak or write when they want to feel good about our species, but I can tell you studying something isn't always the same as feeling it.

And for me, especially during the early pandemic in lockdown, when I was experiencing humanity mostly through

screens I started to really feel as though no matter how much I looked at the

science I felt as though people were selfish and dishonest. I felt a split between my job and

myself.

You talk about that cynicism, right, as a lack of faith in our fellow humans. You also talk about it as a

tool of the status quo. What does that mean? Who benefits from cynicism?

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